TECHNICAL REMARKS ON THE FEMININE LINKER -t vs. -r

Compare the form of the masculine and feminine linkers in the following phrases. The linkers are in red:

Masculine		Feminine
abokin d'alibi abokinka abokina	'friend of the student' 'your (m) friend' 'my friend'	k'awar d'aliba k'awarka k'awata	= k'awad' d'aliba = k'awakki = k'awata	'friend of the student' 'your (f) friend' 'my friend'

The masculine linker is pronounced "n" in every phrase. The feminine linker, on the other hand, is pronounced as either "r" or as a doubling of the next consonant in the first two phrases, but it is always pronounced "t" with the first person genitive pronoun -a.

The reason for this is that Hausa does not allow most consonants, including the consonant "t", to come at the end of a syllable. The feminine linker was originally "t" in all situations. As the language developed the restriction against certain consonants coming at the end of a syllable, the originally "t" turned into "r" when at the end of a syllable, as in the first two phrases above, where the consonant following the linker begins a new syllable.

But in the case of the first person singular pronoun -a, the feminine linker "t" was NOT at the end of a syllable, i.e. it BEGAN the syllable which had the -a pronoun as its vowel. It therefore did not become "r" in just this one case.

How "real" is the pronoun -a in modern Hausa: The explanation above is the historical reason for why Hausa today has genitive constructions with first person singular -n-a masculine and -t-a feminine. Evidence for this analysis comes both from within Hausa and from related languages. There is some question, however, whether this analysis is "real" in the minds of Hausa speakers today. It seems that many (maybe most or even all?!) Hausa speakers see Hausa as having two special first person singular genitive pronouns -na and -ta, i.e. in these cases the n and t are just part of the pronoun, not the linker. From the purely analytical point of view of the linguist, this is "wrong", but from the psychological standpoint of speakers of a language, the linguist's analysis is often irrelevant to the way they think about and speak their language!